Sunday, September 19, 2010

Communication

According to the dictionary, communication is "the imparting or interchange of thoughts, opinions, or information by speech, writing, or signs." I find this definition to be quite sufficient. In the exercise that was done in class on Cyber Communication, people pointed out that when we communicate online we are communicating through an intermediary, the World Wide Web. Despite this common ground, it seems that different groups have different interpretation of how the actual communication process worked.

In my group we illustrated the communication process as everyone being senders and receivers at the same time interacting through the World Wide Web. In the class one of the group challenged our illustration stating that some people can only be just sending but not receiving, and vice versa. Thus they concluded that there should be some arrows that only showed a sender but not sender/receiver. I find this illustration to be incorrect. The incorrectness is found by their oversimplification and disregard to the actual workings of the World Wide Web. An example can be found from someone posting a comment to a friend of theirs on Facebook, but never logging back on to read their friend's feedback.

In this senario, some might argue that the person that posted the comment only sent a message and did not receive anything. But a contradiction to this statement exist that by looking at the website itself you have received some form of information. The existence of an advertisement is a good example. In the opposite senario, where someone goes to facebook and reads a comment but not responding, some might argue that person is a receiver but not a sender. There also exist a contradiction to that statement. Your action of clicking the mouse or typing something and hitting enter or by logging into Facebook is the act of sending information. The reason for this is that the way the computer works is through the process of input and output. Clicking, visiting a site, or entering a search is the process of inputting. When you input something it might not be of use to you, but it is certainly used by other companies for research or business purposes.

Works Cited:

Internet
"communication." Dictionary.com Unabridged. Random House, Inc. 19 Sep. 2010. . Septemeber 19, 2010.

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